Happy Holi

This is a new one on me I must admit, and I thought I knew quite a few different festivals, Holi a festival of colours or of love. Read more about the festival here.

Which got me thinking, colours (I sense a colour theme developing on Fridays) it's spring, there for new shoots from bulbs emerging from a cold winter underground showing us their little flashes of daffodil yellow, the snowdrops, crocuses and all the others just climbing out blinking their petals towards the sun.

Now the point of this post, what makes you decided the colours you use in cards or any craft project you're doing? Is it the celebration, Mothers Day, Easter etc, or is it guided as you create your project?

I know we've been quiet this week, we've been busy with sourcing new dies, trying to get our heads around a demo of our new site and till system, as well as the usual matters we do on a daily basis.

Aswell as wondering what this big yellow thing in the sky was, this large fiery ball drew us from the inner sanctum of the shop to point and look in awe at it, then someone pointed out what it was.

Anyway, have a great weekend, take good care and happy crafting :o)

17 Shades of Grey

It's just been on the radio that 50 Shades of Grey is still raking in phenomenal amounts of money, that's great to hear, a film doing so well. 

This got my mind thinking, just how many shades of grey, are there? Bear with me, there is a point to this, and it's nothing to do with the books or film.

Below are 17 shades of grey, quite easy to distinguish each shade














However, if you look at this spectrum wheel, you'll see, or least get an indication of how many shades of grey there are

Not my image, Image from http://patternity.org/tag/greyscale/ 

Yes, yes Mark, that's all well and good, but just exactly is your point? I hear you say.
Well, What about the little understatements, lowlights, undertones and embellishments, which might just add a little something to what you're making, and finish it off quite nicely, such as a .... Letraset Pro Markers

Tada :), all this just to mention a pen which can add subtle yet massive changes to your crafted items, and nothing at all to do with the film either :o)

Ooohhhh, look, it's the weekend again

I say that like it's a surprise, Friday follows Thursday, just like it's been for the last 104736 weeks (I have just worked this out from 0 AD, or rather 0 CE (Common Era) as it's now known, and BC is now known as BCE (Before Common Era) either way, that's an awful lot of Fridays.

Which then brings me quite nicely to those of us who don't have to work weekends (I used to have to work 7 days a week, and the concept of a weekend was vague at best, I only really used to be able to tell what day it was if I the kids had to go to school, a mental flow chart of Do kids need to be up? Yes - it's a weekday, No - either holiday or weekend.

Forgive me I'm rambling somewhat, the point of this particular post is: Is there anything you'd like to see on our site, and particular designer, style, brand etc.
The reason I ask, I had an e-mail from a customer asking if we could show some bigger pictures of some of our dies, there are 160 of these dies in stock, and many many more to come from the Manufacturer, so now faced with a difficult choice, do I grab 1 of each die and take an enlarged picture of said dies, or try and grab them from the Manufacturer???

Choices, decisions etc...

I've just noticed how masculine this site looks

Doing my usual morning checks before setting off to the office, see how many orders we have, how many contacts and queries, check Facebook, Google +, twitter etc then I came here to see if there were any comments, and was truck immediately at how masculine it looks.
This is not to say that I don't have a feminine side, just that when I was looking through the templates this particular one caught my eye.

So with this in mind, a quick question, does how a site/ bog look on screen influence your perceptions of that site?

For example, if the blog had warm soft colours with a decorate border make you think that this was more of a craft thing than just a rambling blog about lots of different things?

Just found a picture which shows this perfectly, there's lots of styles on there, but all about the same thing.